


the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock

by armsofthestorm



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: First Kiss, Jealousy, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 13:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17142686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/armsofthestorm/pseuds/armsofthestorm
Summary: Lew finds himself watching Dick across the room, quite jealous of the young woman who's managed to convince him to dance. Things proceed from there.





	the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mols](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mols/gifts).



> One of mols' prompts was jealousy, so this is what I've come up with! Hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Title is obvi from Othello.
> 
> ETA: Just read through the fic and realised the last few paragraphs were missing!! Apparently I can't copy-paste properly, but it's fixed now.

Dick Winters is sitting at a bar stool, about ten feet away from where Lew’s trying to get the attention of the bartender. He takes a moment to appreciate the sight: casually slouched over the bar, nursing a damn coca cola of all things. He cuts a fine figure in the uniform, like he always does, and since Dick sitting at the bar stool at all had required the alignment of two minor miracles— first, that Easy had kept their passes for the weekend and second, that Dick had agreed to come out dancing— Lew feels he’s due a bit of admiring.

The bartender frees up, Lew has to shout his order over the noise of the crowd, and by the time he looks back at Dick, he’s apparently been approached by one of the young ladies from the town and pressed into service on the dancefloor, notwithstanding the surplus of young men in the room as compared to young women.

Lew’s gut twists with something hot and irritated and quite unexpected. He knows he’s been carrying a torch for Dick for quite some time now, but jealousy isn’t his usual choice of selfish, unbecoming emotion, and this is new.

Dick’s new dance partner is a pretty blonde in a nice but rather plain blue dress. Her curls are going limp in the humidity, and Lew thinks rather uncharitably that Dick could do a lot better. Then, embarrassed at himself, he swirls the ice around in his glass and takes a long drink.

Get a grip, he tells himself. Get another drink from the hopeless bartender, find a girl, dance away your sorrows, and then let Dick drag you back to your shitty room at the other end of town at end of the night so you can stew in your drunkenness and inadequacy with him sleeping the sleep of the sober and habitually early-rising right beside you.

Lew looks down at a trail of condensation running down the side of his glass, and after a moment’s contemplation, finishes it off in a single swallow.

&&&

Looking back on the night before through the dismal lens of a hangover—the morning sun streaming onto the hotel bed at the wholly unnecessary hour of 0730 on a Sunday morning—Lew has to admit that all the whiskey after about the sixth glass had probably been a mistake. He’s normally a cheerful drunk, but last night he’d been brittle and morose, and after he’d frightened off the second dance partner with his general air of misery, he’d taken up a seat at the bar and spent the rest of the evening watching Dick swing a succession of women around the floor and getting steadily drunker, imagining he was in their place and hating every second of it.

Lew’d kept up the envious surveillance of the dance floor until Dick eventually came over, flushed and a little rumpled and all the more unfairly attractive for it, to ask if he wanted to head back to their room.

“You alright?” he'd asked as they exited onto the street.  

“Just great,” said Lew, then felt dizzy, so slung an arm over Dick’s shoulder to prevent himself pitching into the gutter. “Probably had a few too many, you know me.” He'd then tried very hard not to focus on how warm Dick’s body was against him, and failed completely.

Dick had laughed and smiled at him, which in turn had made Lew’s stomach feel kind of like he was about to lose the night’s liquor all over their shoes, but also kind of pleasant.

“I know you,” he said fondly. “Didn’t get into any trouble when I wasn’t looking out for you?”

“Hardly,” Lew said, though the warmth in his stomach suddenly felt like it’d been replaced with ice. “Thought you said you knew me.”

In the morning, under the bright light of day of course it seems insane to think that Dick would be watching Lew across the room like he’d been watching Dick—for one, they’d have noticed each other—but it was never fun to hear that the torch you were carrying for someone had about the same odds as a candle in a blizzard.

Still, thought Lew as he rolled out of bed in search of a shower and the blackest coffee he could find: you can’t leave the poor bastard to face the Nazis alone once we ship out, so I guess you're stuck with him, and the hopeless infatuation along with it. The only way out is through, chin up and all that. 

 

* * *

 

 

The next time Lew finds himself watching Dick from across the room is in Aldbourne a few months later. He, Harry, Buck Compton and Dick have all found their way to one of the local pubs. Buck, as is his wont, is playing darts on the other side of the room, though by all accounts he seems to be losing badly, while Lew and Harry nurse a beer each in one of the quieter corners of the main room. Dick is two tables over, chatting animatedly to a WAAF with hair nearly as bright as his own, and Lew is trying to quash the desire to drag Dick bodily away from her.

The green-eyed monster's been rearing its ugly little head at distinctly inopportune moments lately, such as when Dick's talking to the men, or any of the higher ups, or pretty much any time he's quite rightly ignoring Lew in favour of his actual duties. If it weren't for the fact that Dick's commitment to his work weren't one of his most attractive qualities, Lew might be quite annoyed about it, but as it is he's more bemused. And irritated at himself, but what else is new. 

Lew’s trying to focus on what Harry’s telling him—something about Kitty—but his gaze keeps shifting to Dick and it must be more obvious than he thinks, because Harry knocks him on the arm and tells him to buck up after about the third time his attention slides back to Dick and his friend.

“You gotta let Winters have a shot with the ladies sometimes,” he says, “you know they can’t resist your charms and it isn’t fair. Besides, your wife’s much prettier than her.”

Lew laughs. “You’ve never even met my wife,” he says. “How the fuck would you know?”

Harry shrugs. “Seen a picture,” he says. “Looked pretty enough there.” He takes a long swig of his beer.

“And here I thought you only had eyes for Kitty.”

Harry looks genuinely offended. “I didn’t say she was prettier than  _Kitty_.”

Lew leans across the table to swat Harry across the head; Harry dodges and grins back at him. “That’s my wife you’re talking about, you little…”

“Kitty’s  _my_  fiancée,” says Harry. “Ah crap, looks like Dick’s struck out.”

Lew’s head whips around, probably too fast to be casual, and sure enough, the red-headed WAAF is making her way over to the friends waving to her by the bar, and Dick is manoeuvring himself around some spare chairs to get back to his and Harry’s table.

“Too bad,” Harry says, and gets up to clap Dick hard on the back. “Better luck next time.”

Dick nods, looking a bit stunned at Harry’s assault, but he smiles when he sees Lew. Lew’s traitorous heart, of course, flutters in his chest.

“I guess.”

 “Sure, sure,” says Harry. “Here, have a seat, tell us all about it.”

“Thanks.” Dick pulls up a chair and sits down heavily. “But there’s really nothing to tell. She was pretty interested in the States, and I guess I was pretty happy to tell her.”

Harry shakes his head. "I'm sure that's what she told you," he says. "But really..."

Dick looks embarrassed, so Lew casts about for a subject change. Coming up with nothing, he goes with the obvious: "You wanna get out of here?"

Dick nods, but Harry protests. "Christ Nix, never thought you'd be the one to leave me high and dry on a night out. D'you think it's Winters rubbing off on you?"

I wish, Lew thinks, but definitely does not say out loud. 

"I'm going to find Compton, see if I can't beat him at darts too."  

Lew shrugs. "Sure, Harry, have fun."

Harry salutes sloppily and picks his way around the tables to the darts game, leaving Lew and Dick alone. 

Lew drains his beer and stands. "We off, then?"

"Yep," says Dick. He's looking at Lew oddly as he says it, but he follows him outside so Lew guesses it isn't a problem. Maybe he's spilled beer down his front or something, and Dick feels like it'd be rude to point it out. 

 

&&&

 

Lew isn’t as drunk as he was the last time he and Dick walked home together, so instead of draping himself over Dick’s shoulder he keeps a pretty reasonable distance between them. No need to invite trouble in when it’s already knocking down your door.

He’s still a bit drunk though, so he doesn’t notice that Dick’s taking them on a distinctly scenic route until they’re almost on the edge of town. In his defence, the blackout does make it pretty difficult to see anything.

"Nix," says Dick, sounding odd, as he comes to a stop in front of a tree. At least, Lew thinks there’s a tree here. "Are we alright?"

"Huh?" says Lew, clearly at his eloquent best. "Yeah, course we are. Why?"

"It's just that I thought I saw you uh, glaring at me before, and—" he breaks off.

"Was I?" Lew was internally cursing himself. If both Dick and Harry had noticed his cranky surveillance, he must’ve been really damn obvious. "Sorry Dick, really. Think I sometimes get a bit of a glower going by accident—the eyebrows, you know?" 

"Great." Dick smiles and runs a hand through his hair, looking embarrassed again. "Sorry Lew, it's only that we'll probably be jumping into who the hell knows where pretty soon, and I don't wanna do it without you, you know”—here he pauses to rub the back of his neck with a sheepish hand— “at my back.”

And if that last sentence isn’t just tailored to cut Lew off at the knees, emotionally speaking. Christ. Dick is about the opposite of free with his emotions, and his open confession feels like the slightly sickening combination of the bestowing of a high honour and a punch to the gut.  

“Course I’ve got your back,” says Lew, clapping him on the shoulder. “Wouldn’t let you jump into France by yourself even if you wanted me to.”

“Thanks, Lew,” says Dick. He makes a gesture like he’d about to touch Lew’s arm, but ends up sticking both hands in his pockets. Lew feels a rush of fondness for how awkward Dick can be in his body sometimes, particularly for a man whose physical competence generally bordered on the gratuitous. “I guess we should head in now properly.”

“Probably. Unless you fancy sleeping under this tree.”

Dick snorts. “Probably going to have to get used to worse.”

“No, see, that’s why we should appreciate the actual mattresses while we’ve got ‘em.”

“Right.”

Lew does put an arm over his shoulder this time, and Dick leans into him probably without realising it, and they walk through the dark streets as one, a clumsy creature with a surplus of legs and heads. 

 

* * *

 

After the drop into Normandy, and taking Carentan, and Dick getting hit in the leg, Lew is happy to admit his ridiculous bout of jealousy has abated. Now he's caught a glimpse of the war, seen how quickly the great churning gears of its engine can chew men up and spit them out like so much waste, and he's more shaken by it than he'd like to admit. It wasn't as though he thought it'd be a walk in the park— to put it mildly—but the reality of the thing is far worse than anything Lew could've dreamed up. After all that, possessiveness over Dick's time and attention seems a little beside the point, again to put it mildly.

On top of the terror and grief that lingers with all of them even now they're back on Allied soil, Dick seems to have taken Easy's losses as evidence of his failings as a commander, as if any amount of training or any tactical manoeuvring could make human flesh and bone impervious to machine gun fire.

Now Lew mostly wants to make him sit down and rest his damn leg for a change, and to do his best to keep him safe for the rest of the war. Also, with the shadow of his own death looming over him more powerfully than ever before, he's about ready to throw caution to the wind and just tell Dick how he feels, see if they can make something of it. He wasn't sure before, but now he figures Dick's rejection can't hurt worse than dying alone in a field somewhere without ever even having a shot. 

And there might, after all, be something in the smiles Lew likes to think Dick saves just for him, besides copious amounts of wishful thinking.

He decides to take his chance one afternoon when they've got a few precious hours to themselves. Lew knocks on the door to Dick's billet, trying not to smooth out his hair or fuss with his tie as he waits for someone to open it. It's lucky he doesn't have long to wait; Dick's as conscientious about visitors as he is about everything else. 

"Fancy a walk?" asks Lew, reminding himself it's just Dick and trying to sound nonchalant. "It's a lovely day." 

"Lew!" says Dick. Lew doesn't think he's imagining the way his face lights up when he sees him. "Yeah, sure, gimme a minute and I'll be right out." 

Lew's scouted out a quiet destination beforehand, in a cluster of sheltered trees, sheltered from view and far enough outside of town that there isn't likely there'll be many people about anyway, but he leads Dick there subtly, as if they're just taking a wander out in the countryside. As far as Dick's concerned that _is_ what they're doing, Lew thinks. 

Lew points casually at the trees, they wander over, and Lew goes to sit on the fallen tree trunk beneath an old yew tree. The watery afternoon sunlight gives the whole scene a flat look, but Lew thinks it's rather lovely. They sit down, and Dick crosses one leg over the other, looking somewhat doubtful. 

"So uh, there's no really good way to say this," says Lew, before the silence can stretch out too long. "But um." 

And he leans over and kisses him lightly on the mouth, then pulls back almost immediately, heart pounding. 

"Lew?" says Dick. He's gone a bit pink. "What was that for?" 

"I didn't want to jump back onto the front without trying it," says Lew, all in a hurry. "I've wanted to for a long time."

"Lew," says Dick again, but he's smiling this time. "I had no idea." 

Lew laughs, and puts a hand on the side of Dick's face, runs a thumb across his cheekbone and then down the side of his neck. Then he leans in, wetting his lips and closing his eyes for a sweet, simple kiss.

 

 


End file.
